Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi / Thriller

Synopsis

Ray Ferrier (Cruise) is a divorced dockworker and less-than-perfect father. When his ex-wife and her new husband drop off his teenage son Robbie and young daughter Rachel for a rare weekend visit, a strange and powerful lightning storm suddenly touches down. What follows is the extraordinary battle for the future of humankind through the eyes of one American family fighting to survive it in this contemporary retelling of H.G. Wells seminal classic sci-fi thriller.

Ray Ferrier (Cruise) is a divorced dockworker and less-than-perfect father. When his ex-wife and her new husband drop off his teenage son Robbie and young daughter Rachel for a rare weekend visit, a strange and powerful lightning storm suddenly touches down. What follows is the extraordinary battle for the future of humankind through the eyes of one American family fighting to survive it in this contemporary retelling of H.G. Wells seminal classic sci-fi thriller.

Tech specs

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by Ali_Catterall1 / 10

No one would have believed...

just how badly Spielberg was going to screw this up.

A few thoughts:

If a town centre cracked open in broad daylight, revealing a 500ft
metal flower of death, you'd know about it a mile away. However, when
Cruise and his appallingly unsympathetic kids (including the
interminably shrieking girl-woman that is known as Dakota Fanning, who
surely slid straight from the birth canal clutching an agent) flee to
the 'burbs, it's as if the news hasn't filtered through, with
by-standers milling about doing nothing much of anything.

Imagine a lightning storm ripping through Clapham, followed by an
immense metal tripod, vaporising everything in its path. (No clothes,
mind  just the people inside them. Perhaps these aliens are after our
laundry. Actually, there's a Woody Allen routine about that, and it
makes a lot more sense.) Imagine the noise. The smell. Were you in
Balham, you'd know about it. Worlds would have us believe you wouldn't
lift an eyebrow. Simply, when Cruise and co aren't in immediate shot,
these tripods don't appear to exist. The only reason we know they do,
is because a TV crew has a video  a VHS!  of them eating up some
buildings somewhere else. Europe, apparently, has already been mostly
decimated. Well, how incredibly lucky that massive landmass called the
United States merely suffered a flesh wound in Boston. Although Europe,
admittedly, is the subject of the movie's one decent joke.

Worse is to come: a pinch of Cameron here, a steal of Bruckheimer
there, this is one of the most derivative movies yet - albeit one with
obvious stage sets and pound-shop CGI. It's as if Spielberg has sunk
down under the weight of so much shoulder perching, and has been
reduced to foraging for ideas in the mud. The aliens, when they finally
emerge from their tripods, are duffers: neither scary, not convincing 
while their reconnaissance 'tendril' sports a couple of plastic
reflectors that wouldn't look out of place on a mountain bike.

On that note, the one effort to bamboozle the uni-eyed tendril is
laughable too: they place a mirror in its way. Surely something of this
power and capacity isn't going to fooled by a bunch of reconstituted
silica? The acting, as you'd expect, is uniformly awful  Cruise (who
specialises in playing gormless obnoxious assholes) is especially bad 
his two facial expressions wavering from "shock" to "delayed shock" at
inopportune moments.

The pacing's terrible  it just suddenly ends, bang. The aliens catch
colds and die. Film over. And most surprisingly in a Spielberg flick,
there's no emotional clout here  at one point, the elder son begs his
dad to let him go and see the front-line military action  not to join
them in the fighting, just to have a gawp. "If you love me, you'll let
me go" he says. It's supposed to be one of the Big Emotional
Highpoints, but just comes across as a surly teenager (who hitherto was
not surly) throwing a tantrum because he wants a better view of the
fireworks.

The final shot of Ray delivering the kids back to mum and new boyfriend
(in a bizarrely peaceful and untouched street) may as well be the
culmination of having successfully delivered them home from a
particularly lengthy snarl-up round the one-way gyratory system.

There's not one sympathetic character in the entire film, and by the
end of the movie Ray's still an a**hole. No redemption, no lessons
learned  other than aliens should carry a packet of fisherman's
friends with them before they set out.

Reviewed by jeffstotler3 / 10

People were laughing after the screening

After the screening, some people cheered and clapped, others sat in disgust and laughed. I felt cheated. Spielberg was not even playing within his own rules. When the attack begins, every piece of electronic equipment stops working. There is even a nice shot of Tom Cruise's watch, stopped, of course. However, moments later when the Tripod rises from the earth, people are snapping pictures on digital cameras and one person is videotaping everything on a camcorder.

The movie does have some great effects but the storyline is seriously lacking. The part of the movie that left me feeling cheated is the end. We have just seen the destruction of millions of humans, but Cruise is able to make it to Boston, a large city, where the streets are deserted. We focus in on a row of Brownstones where a single family emerges. The family looks as if they are about to go to a wedding. Everyone is clean, well dressed, and Tom Cruise's ex-mother-in-law looks like she just had a manicure. We are supposed to believe that after this horrible attack, this one family is unscathed and reunited in a major city? Don't be ridiculous. I hoped this movie would be a blockbuster. Something to make me believe Hollywood is generating creative, and innovative stories to take me away from reality for a couple of hours. This movie was a serious disappointment.

Reviewed by jcv24 / 10

Meanders everywhere!

Having never seen the original, my point of view is going to be based on the movie itself, not its history. And my negative review is in no way tarnished by Cruise's strange behavior. Cruise and Jacko are probably brothers separated at birth but don't know it, but that's another issue.

I'm not sure who's to blame for this movie. Perhaps Spielberg had too many yes-men around him (or yes-women, let's be inclusive here). Perhaps the original WOTW is a lot like this and Spielberg liked it so much, this was meant to be his tribute. Whatever. This one stinks. Tributes shouldn't stink.

This movie had potential (and lotsa hype) but was utterly ruined by the "I'm-a-bad-father" subplot that the movie kept diverting to all throughout the film. Spielberg poured on the syrup at these points and it really did make me roll my eyes after awhile. The scene on the hill where the brother, for reasons that were not at all explained, just -had- to see what was going on on the other side of the hill actually made me squirm. His line about "if you love me you'll let me go" was straight out of the cornfields. Awful.

Dakota did a decent job but this certainly pales in comparison to other movies I've seen her in, like Man on Fire. As usual, Dakota and her brother play the smart-ass kids to the inept father. Never seen that before, have we Steve? Turn on the TV and there's hundreds of shows with characters like that already on.

Don't get me started on the basement scene. Completely unnecessary and went on WAY too long. The bit with the proboscis was just completely silly. Spielberg's version of horror/suspense I guess. One minute the aliens are out there tilling up the earth on a global scale with a horrific ferocity, the next minute they send this little wormy proboscis thing down into the basement to ever-so-gently poke around. Ooh, be careful, don't touch anything! Not to mention Farmer Ted thinking he's going to kill these things with a SHOTGUN of all things. Tim Robbins never could do scenes well with high levels of emotion, and he does it again here. Anytime he has to show intense emotion, the corners of his mouth curl down in a frown and that's as far as it goes. Like clockwork.

When the ship starts to come out of the ground, and even after it has come completely out of the ground, the people around it largely stay in the same spot and are STANDING THERE STARING AT IT. A three-legged behemoth... just came out of the ground from nowhere... 200+ feet tall with arms for days... and these geniuses are standing around waiting to see what it will do next? Only when it starts putting the smack down on everyone do they seem to give up any hope that it's E.T. and start to run away. Did they expect some sort of welcoming party instead?

The idea that thousands of those things, as huge as they are, could lie dormant under the ground without being detected. To accept that you would have to perform far more than suspension of disbelief and go straight for the alternate universe explanation. Pure laziness if you ask me, like Spielberg didn't give a damn about providing a plausible background for these creatures.

Lots and lots of little events that dead-end into nowhere. The friends who miss the boat. Who are they? Why should we care that they didn't make it? The reporters who are scrounging around for scraps of food as though they haven't eaten in weeks when the aliens just showed up LESS THAN A DAY AGO. We care that her sidekick is deaf why? The airplane. Why is it such a huge deal that one has crashed? Their minivan must have a protective shield of its own because the neighborhood-razing plane didn't put a scratch on their getaway car. Oh look! There's a neat little path for them to drive the minivan out of this mess.

For a bunch of alien invaders, talk about poor planning.... They sent waves of tripods to select locations and no ships to other locations, thereby offering people a place to run away to. And if they've "been watching us" for so long, wouldn't they have figured out beforehand that there are things on our planet that will kill them? Apparently not. They're smart enough to build these monstrous craft but not smart enough to build leak-free suits (or any suits for that matter) in case there's some icky bugs that might kill them? Brilliant!

Ah anyway, I'd like my money back please. What a stinker! Spielberg blew it with this one by once again making the meat and potatoes of the film take a back seat to some sort of dysfunctional family crisis resolution. If Cruise had been the only main character, if his character had been more of a hero-type, if they'd thrown out the whole family bit, this would've been a lot better. But they didn't.

Did Steve just give up on this movie at one point and say to hell with it, this movie's too far gone to achieve redemption? It certainly looks that way. This film doesn't even look like a finished product. This looks like a whole bunch of plots thrown together before a good editor comes along and puts together a cohesive film.